


my fake plastic love

by silkinsilence



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, and I mean really unhealthy coping mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-25
Updated: 2019-02-25
Packaged: 2019-11-05 18:08:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17923766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silkinsilence/pseuds/silkinsilence
Summary: Fareeha Amari will live forever.





	my fake plastic love

Fareeha Amari’s Raptora suit fails on a Tuesday afternoon on a counter-Talon mission in Lima. Horrified onlookers describe the scene like watching a falling star, how her blue suit hurtled toward the ground with monstrous velocity. Her teammates are there; Angela Ziegler is called in from Gibraltar while Amari is rushed to the closest hospital. By the time Ziegler arrives, there is nothing for her to do but sign the death certificate with shaking hands. A decade ago she saw Ana Amari get on a transport and never come back, and now her daughter has followed.

Satya Vaswani is in Lijiang on a diplomatic mission with several other members of Overwatch. When she receives the news, her comrades describe her going utterly still. She insists that the mission continue, and her voice is level and businesslike. She seems, almost, to be smiling.

She is not smiling.

* * *

The idea grips her so fiercely and so completely that there is no time and no reason to grieve. She returns to Gibraltar to the distraught faces of the people who have become her family, but she does not weep. She wishes she could convince them they do not have to either. It will be all right; she will _make it_ all right. She will do it or die trying; there is no alternative. Never in her life has a project been so imperative. Perhaps it has all led up to this, and she will not fail. She cannot even begin to consider failure as a possibility.

She sequesters herself in the lab and does not leave except for occasional meals or the restroom. She avoids the others when possible. They try, inevitably, to comfort her. They neither know nor understand. She simply works around the clock, irrepressible. If only Vishkar could have summoned such fervor from her, she would have been an unstoppable weapon for them. If she truly is a genius at hard-light construction, as she has been told so many times, she will prove it now.

Sleep is an unwilling reprieve taken an hour or two at a time with her head slumped on her desk. She eats less and less, subsisting on energy bars so she doesn’t have to leave her work for a moment.

A week into the project, Hana brings her a tray of food and sits opposite her, just watching her for several long minutes. Satya does not know what to say. She is vexed by the attention. She does not know how to put her intentions into words in a way that anyone else will understand. Hana is her friend, her very good friend, but she will try to stop her. They all will.

“What are you doing in here?” Hana finally asks, though, and Satya has always been awful at lying as well as despising doing so, and so she considers her words with care and closes her eyes and tells her friend, the friend who gave her the impetus to pursue Fareeha in the first place, who has been her rock and confidante at Overwatch. She tells her.

When she opens her eyes, Hana is staring at her with tears slowly rolling down her cheeks and her face contorted into a look Satya has never seen there before.

“You can’t,” she whispers. “Satya, you _can’t._ ”

In that moment Satya hates her, is forced to bite back bile and try not to slam her hands on the desk too hard.

“I can and I will,” she says through stiff lips. “Please leave.”

Hana does not leave right away. She sits there and stares at Satya while she cries silently and watches her work. It frazzles Satya to be watched like that. Hana’s reaction, too, has upset her, but she does not think about it. She cannot think about it. There is only the design and her goal and determination.

* * *

There are, fortunately, thousands upon thousands of recordings in Athena’s archives of their lives on the base in the years since Overwatch’s recall. Fareeha features in so many of them. After they unanimously agreed to make her Strike Commander, she insisted on spending time with all of them. She got very good at street hockey and okay at soccer with Lúcio, decent at Hana’s video games of choice, even broadly knowledgeable in the horticulture that so fascinates Bastion. She would dance with Satya.

Satya must not linger in the archives, she knows. She is there for only one purpose, and she will not let the monstrous thing biting at her heels catch her. But she finds an old voice message Fareeha left her just a few months into their relationship, and she listens to it over and over again in the cold stillness of the laboratory.

“I love you,” Fareeha’s voice, soft with feeling and only a bit muddled by the medium, says again and again and again, until the battery dies and Satya comes awake like a sleepwalker who wandered far from her bed.

* * *

She stands mechanical and beautiful like a goddess of hard-light and electricity and artificial memories. The likeness is achingly familiar, and as soon as the face is complete Satya cannot help but draw her fingers across it, again and again, kiss the lips and stroke the cheeks and wait for her to wake up.

But this is no fairy tale, and the hand-made woman before her will not awaken of her own volition, so Satya returns to work, each success emboldening her. Her heart pounds with excitement. She is so close, so close. And Fareeha comes together piece by piece, and Satya comes together with her, and when she finally sobs they are tears of happiness at the face that blinks and turns and observes her.

(Not how she used to. Not anything at all like how she used to. Mechanical and incomplete and _wrong,_ a child’s toy, a mockery of the woman she loved and loves—)

“Fareeha,” she breathes out, and holds her creation in her arms, and she is cold and hard but it does not matter, not when there is something to hold onto.

“Satya,” Fareeha says, and it is _her voice, her voice, saying her name, saying her name—_ “The point what is you?”

Satya steps back, joy dissolving into disappointment. Something sick threatens at the back of her throat. She can feel the thing she has been keeping at bay threatening to arrive at last.

But she forces herself to smile, because first drafts are never really perfect, and she would be a fool to expect it to be so easy. She will perfect it. She will perfect _her._

* * *

“Satya, is that—is that supposed to be—”

Lena’s voice trembles. She looks almost terrified. Most of them do, wearing expressions ranging from disgust to shock to fury.

McCree is more straightforward.

“What the _fuck_ is that _thing_?”

Hana, sitting on the couch, catches Satya’s eye, but she looks as lost and disapproving as the rest of them. She doesn’t understand. None of them understand. Before it did not disturb her, but now, as she looks at the people she thought were her family, a horrifying panic rises in Satya.

She hurries from the common room, Fareeha a cold and steady presence beside her, before the tears spill over. In her dorm room, Fareeha’s hard arms encircle her as they lay together in her bed. Fareeha does not stroke her back or play with her hair. She just sits, motionless.

“They don’t like me,” she notes flatly.

Satya shakes her head. “They’ll understand. I’ll make them—”

But then her voice breaks off into another sob, and Fareeha’s chest is too cold and hard to make a good pillow.

* * *

She sees pieces of the wreckage at the bottom of the cliffs, fallen like Fareeha was in Dorado, before the waves sweep them away. She feels horror and numb anger at that, at everyone else there, and it is a knife through the heart once more.

They all deny it, but she can’t trust any of them, it feels. Perhaps it was all of them. She looks at Hana and does not recognize her. Who are these people? Who are they to her? They stood by and watched Fareeha fall from the sky and did nothing, nothing. Why wasn’t Doctor Ziegler there? Why couldn’t any of them save her?

Why wasn’t she there?

In one of the communal showers, she curls up in a ball on the floor and lets lukewarm water pour over her. They are frequently cleaned but she still has always imagined them grimy and full of bacteria, wearing shoes whenever she washed. But now what does it matter? What does any of it matter? Fareeha used to hold her in the shower, used to wash her hair and touch her all over and let herself be washed in return, would press herself against the wall so Satya did not have to touch it.

She screams and screams and sobs out her anger and grief and hopelessness, choking on it, certain she will die of the emotion alone.

She forces herself to calm. This is only a setback. She has the plans and the experience now. She will build her again, and again, as many times as it takes for it to be perfect.

Fareeha Amari will live forever.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments always appreciated!


End file.
